A blog about the history, current state, and the future of the electric guitar and tube-based amplifier combo and how this de rigueur musical instrument that matured during the Rock N' Roll-era continues to both evolve and refuses to die.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

It may be a still relatively esoteric technique to most
amateur or indie musicians, but did you know that re-amping could be the most
cost effective technique to record killer guitar tones?

By: Ringo Bones

Lets face it, recording studios with very good acoustics
costs ungodly amounts of money for the musician who has yet to achieve
commercial success and given that most – as in a little more than half – of hard
rock and heavy metal guitar based music in current mainstream FM airplay have
god-awful guitar tracks when compared to classic rock tracks – even those
during the hair metal era of the 1980s and early 1990s. But can the “ham-and-egger”
musician this day and age even manage to record killer guitar tones like they
use to during the golden age of hard rock and heavy metal on a shoestring
budget? Fortunately, there is such an electric guitar recording technique and
it is called re-amping.

Re-amping: Running final guitar takes off tape – or other
digital recording media – into guitar amps miked in a live room and recording
them back onto tape or other digital recording media is one of those electric
guitar recording techniques that gives more bang for the buck and yet produces
an inexplicably excellent result. Given that it is quite a simple and ingenious
method to “fatten the tone” of anemically recorded guitar tracks, clean or
distorted, it is quite a relatively esoteric technique and not-so-often talked
about studio recording technique. I mean when was the last time a Billboard Top
40 rock guitarist ever mentioned re-amping during press interviews back when
Ronald Reagan was still the elected emperor of the free world? It was probably
Rollins Band guitarist Chris Haskett who revealed that he used re-amping to
record the electric guitar tracks of his solo albums during an interview with EQ magazine that was published
in their April 1998 issue.

Legend has it that it was the funk maestro George Clinton
who was the first one to have used re-amping in the studio around the late
1970s. After not being happy with a drum sequence sound during a particular recording
session – i.e. it had an “anemic tone” – George Clinton allegedly ran 24-outs
to 24 separate loudspeakers placed on chairs in a live room and then miked the
set-up in stereo and ran it back into tape. It was said that it not only “fattened
the tone” of the drum sequence but also made it punchier. I first heard this
particular anecdote about George Clinton’s studio recording techniques back in
1995, but many amateur hard rock / heavy metal musicians since the mid 1980s noticed
that live miking guitar amps resulted in a more punchier and fatter tone as
opposed to sending electric guitar signals directly into the mixing board and then to the
recording device.

Back in 1992 while testing the stage mikes for our band’s
live rehearsal, out of curiosity I got a Casio SA-1 “pocket keyboard” and placed
a Shure SM57 Beta directly in front of its itsy-bitsy speaker and clicked in
the “tuba” setting. Unexpectedly, it resulted in something akin to a cross
between an electric bass guitar tuned 2-frets down and a very large pipe organ.
The resulting tone is so beautiful that it preoccupied my band and I for almost
half an hour and an inflated band rehearsal studio bill. On recording acoustic
guitars, re-amping tends to make them sound as if the amps and recording
equipment as if it uses 1930s era vacuum tubes – i.e. 6SN7s, 6SL7s or even Type
85 vacuum tubes.

Another advantage of re-amping is not only does it cuts down
on your recording studio costs but also you don’t have to worry about blowing
the vibe or the take, which, more often than not, happens when you over-obsess
the mike placement during the actual recording session. It is almost like
working with MIDI – the performance is already there. You have a little bit
more leisure about guitar amp placement, and miking and tone so a that point
you can do a lot of work very effectively in a small project room and make it
bigger later.